1. Go mobile-friendly

• Create a mobile app that works
• Responsive and static websites

Having a mobile-friendly website is critical for your online presence. In many countries, smartphone traffic now exceeds desktop traffic. If your website does not work properly in smartphones (non-responsive), you may be losing traffic.

2. Boost your customer service

• Communication channel
• Knowledge base
• Issue escalation

Your application grows much more when the customer service is working fast and efficiently. The more happy customers you have the more free marketing you get!

3. Build your brand

• Logo
• Design
• Culture

Branding is the perception your clients have of your company, it helps you to stand out from the competition. Also the brand literally represents your company. A modern and meaningful logo, nice designs and a well accepted culture makes your company value higher.

4. Prioritise!

• Decision frameworks
• Scoring models

One of the challenges of this century is making right decisions, therefore prioritising projects observing your business values is essential. Decision frameworks and scoring models can give you the guidance you need.

5. Stop working to death

• Business automation
• Integration tools

Stop doing manual and tedious tasks! Integrate and automate your business tools in a secure manner. This will save you precious time, avoid human errors and solve problems much faster.

Need help and don’t know where to start? No problem, we can help you to move forward. Give us a shout at hello@catallyst.io.

5 New Year’s resolutions for your business was originally published in Catallyst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Currently, I’m a software engineer at T-Pro in Ireland and I always tried to have a good CV in PDF ready to send. After starting working at T-Pro I realized that one thing that makes a difference when looking for a job as a developer is how you show your skills. So I decided to use my free time and develop a single page CV using some of the latest available techs in the market for front-end development. In other words, using my skills to show my skills.

I believe this will make it much easier for companies that are looking for a developer to analyze your application.

If you are not interested in the coding part, you can skip to the CV here: https://lehno.dev

Now, If you want to build something similar, I will be showing you in the next steps how was the process to make it happen, I am also available on comments for any help needed.

What is being used?

1. Alpine.js
2. TailwindCSS
3. Webpack
4. AWS S3 / CloudFront

What was the challenge?

To develop a simple and beautiful page that is very small, loads incredibly fast and it’s 100% responsive that works in any device. Besides, I wanted to get 100 points on every category using Google Lighthouse, which tells you the best practices for web pages.

First, I had to find some inspiration on the internet by searching nice CV pages that others have built. Then my wife who is a UI/UX professional helped me with choosing the colors, font, images, logo, and design of the page.

Thumbs up for her 👍. Second, which front-end library should I use for coding the CV easily and consistently.

As it is a single page, I did not want to use large frameworks like VueJS or Angular. So I found AlpineJS, a lib with 7kb when compressed that can do much more than what it looks. It can show and hide elements, access data in your Javascript file, and execute for each loop commands quickly building lists with less code.

For CSS I always wanted to use TailwindCSS due to its simplicity and very well documented classes. Moreover, it’s easy to purge unused classes, making it very tiny when bundled in your final code.

For packaging all code into a production version, I chose Webpack, which I’m already happy and comfortable with. Webpack has many plugins to generate smaller images, uglify Javascript, and CSS. It also deploys the code with one click directly to AWS S3.

Building the timeline and skills components was a nightmare, more specifically, their content. I wanted to catch readers’attention by having the minimum amount of text as possible, and at the same time make it searchable friendly. On top of it, I’m not a native English speaker, so I had a few people to read it before releasing and fixing my grammar mistakes, which is not a bad thing, getting help and helping someone is a nice chain to keep.

Domain was a hard one to find, I tried to get it inside the AWS ecosystem, but AWS does not have domains finishing with .dev for sale. So I decided to get it on Namecheap and just redirect the DNS to AWS Route53, giving me complete control of the domain in my AWS account. The next step was to create a bucket in S3 to host my page as a static website, following this tutorial on AWS docs was very easy. I’m using Cloudfront to get a free HTTPS certificate, caching and gzip compression (Cloudfront still does not support Brotli).

Putting all these steps together, I was able to build the page in a week.

How about pricing to keep this page online?

The overall cost includes your domain price, I pay $12 per year plus amazon pricing for Route53 and S3. If you go with AWS, it offers you a free tier for many services. Right now, it is costing me $0.73 per month.

I’m leaving the code open source for anyone who wants to check out the implementation. Fell free to send some pull requests to fix anything that is buggy or any typos I’ve made.

https://github.com/lehno/lehno.dev

Leandro Hoffmann

Writing a single page developer CV using the latest front-end tech was originally published in Catallyst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you work in a company that needs to handle media files, here is a tip that will save you money and time.

The Journey to Cost-Effective Media File Conversion

I have been utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) extensively and have become acquainted with its vast array of services. One particular service, the Elastic Transcoder, caught my attention as it appeared to be a promising solution for converting media files into different formats.

The initial plan was to leverage this service to establish a scalable and code-free process for converting wav files into mp3, while also utilizing Amazon S3 events to automate the conversion process. Astonishingly, the setup was seamless, and within a mere 2 hours, we had a working, scalable, and serverless solution.

However, a few months down the line, the cost implications became apparent. The monthly bill skyrocketed to $880, a figure far from economical.

The graph indicates the peak in costs associated with using Elastic Transcoder and how the expenses decreased once we phased out the service. We took a gradual approach in disabling the service to ensure a smooth transition to our new process.

The Shift to a More Economical Solution

The answer is straightforward: Amazon Lambda Functions coupled with FFMPEG. With a bit of assistance from the open-source community, we found our solution.

The inspiration stemmed from a project I worked on four years prior, before the existence of Elastic Transcoder. In that project, I utilized FFMPEG within a Lambda function to generate video thumbnails. Drawing from that experience, I decided to run an instance of FFMPEG inside a Lambda function to convert files between various formats.

The task at hand was to integrate a compiled version of FFMPEG into my Lambda function, write a bit of code to handle the conversion and uploading of files to my S3 bucket, and then deploy it on Amazon. After dedicating a few hours to learning and tweaking, the system was operational, delivering fast and scalable file conversions across all required formats.

Cost-Effective Solution: 0.1 Cent Per Month

Thanks to Amazon’s generous offer of 1 million free requests per month, our operational costs plummeted to just $0.01 per month, despite handling over 100,000 files. This experience served as a valuable lesson, underscoring the importance of exploring diverse solutions. The more you search, the more innovative and abstract ideas you’ll generate, ultimately leading to more efficient and cost-effective solutions.

From $880 to $0.01 using AWS Lambda for media files. was originally published in Catallyst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Você já vivenciou ou ouviu falar das empresas de tecnologia que não tem noção do que querem, tipo, estão loucas! Mas, como assim?

Você vai entrar no mercado de trabalho e acabou de iniciar seu processo de aprendizado na área de tecnologia.

O que é normal?

Uma empresa te contrata e te ajuda a crescer, ela te entende e sabe que você NÃO sabe nada ainda e quem vai ensinar é ela mesma. (Na esperança de não ser sugada e perder o funcionário em pouco tempo)

O que acontece hoje?

A empresa lança a vaga com os seguintes requisitos:

Descrição:

• Conhecimentos avançados nas seguintes linguagens de programação: AngularJS, NodeJS, Ruby, HTML, CSS, Java, C#, Cobol, Objective-C.
• Conhecimentos avançados em PostgreSQL, MongoDB, CasandraDB, PL/SQL
• Inglês, Russo e Mandarim fluente.
• 6 anos de experiencia em Android
• Padrão MVC, IPTU, FDP

Desejável:

• Photoshop (se virar com imagens)
• Conhecimentos em SO (OpenSUSE e Fedora 9)
• Viajar pela empresa com o próprio carro.
• Noções de gerenciamento de área de trabalho
• Noções de atualizações de blogs e redes sociais

Benefícios:

• Remuneração: R$ 1.200,00
• 2 bolachas Maria®
• 1 café
• Plano de Saúde (10%)

Já viram isso?
Sim, isso ocorre mais do que você imagina!

(Óbvio que exageramos pelo humor)
com Pedro Paulo Amorim